Determinants of Patient Satisfaction on Service Quality Dimensions in the Nigeria Teaching Hospitals

This study investigates the use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in estimating the determinants of patients’ satisfaction towards service delivery in six public teaching hospitals located in southwest Nigeria. To do this, the study gathered data from primary sources under consideration. Following this, it adopted a cross-sectional survey research design adopted with the aid of an AHP based questionnaire to obtain primary data. In all, four hundred and twenty copies of questionnaire were distributed to respondents who have been or were patients’ in the selected teaching hospitals using the random sampling technique. Three hundred forty eight (348) copies of the questionnaire were returned, indicating 82.9 percent response rate. Out of these, 326 were correctly completed and found to be valid and useful in line with AHP analysis. A pairwise comparison with Microsoft excels for AHP data. Results from the AHP model revealed that patients’ have the greatest preference for the empathy dimension of service quality in the teaching hospitals with eigenvector of 16.46 %. The least preference was waiting time with eigenvector of 6.9%. Drawing upon these findings, the study concludes AHP can be successfully applied to ascertain the determinants of patients’ satisfaction among service quality dimension. Thus, this study has implication for decisions on effective monitoring of the entire health system towards enhancing quality health care service delivery which would enhance patients` satisfaction.